Politicians have honest disagreements and they stretch the truth to their own benefit. Here are some claims from Tuesday night’s debate that went too far.

Kathleen Wynne

The claim: Ontario benefits from “partnerships” between the government and important businesses, such as deals Wynne has announced with high-tech companies like Cisco and OpenText.

The problem: Although the high-profile announcements look good politically, they’re extremely expensive: Wynne agreed to sink $220 million into Cisco in a 10-year deal to create a minimum 1,700 jobs, and $120 million into OpenText for 1,200 jobs. The case for the deals is that these are multinationals that could choose to put high-paying jobs anywhere, and having them here means spinoff benefits and potential future growth that’ll be good for all of us. But in the short term, it means transferring tax dollars to certain profitable corporations because we happen to like what they do and their leaders hit it off with our politicians. Actual long-term benefits are extremely difficult to prove.

The politicians don’t get high-profile signing ceremonies when companies just choose to locate in Ontario because it’s a great place to do business and hire skilled workers, but that’s a better and fairer route to long-term success. If anything, the fact we have to write cheques to these companies to hire people in Ontario is a sign we’re weaker than we’d like to be, not strong.

The claim: We’ve repaired the collective-bargaining process with teachers. Labour chaos is over.

The claim: If Ontario needs more energy, we should make deals with hydroelectricity-rich neighbours Quebec and Manitoba to supply cheap green power rather than subsidizing wind and solar farms here.

The problem: Quebec and Manitoba aren’t offering cheap electricity to anyone who shows up to buy it, and not in quantity. We do buy power, particularly from Quebec, in the winter and in bits and pieces at other times of the year, but the province doesn’t have a vast surplus of electricity it isn’t using and would be happy to sell to us.

Quebec has a long-term plan to build more northern dams — whose green credentials are iffy, considering the harm they do flooding valleys to create reservoirs — but they’ll be expensive and it’ll only happen if Quebec has customers willing to pay enough to cover the costs. There’s no free lunch. We’d also be competing with other customers, particularly New York State, that also consume Quebec electricity.

Manitoba has hydro resources, too, which could be useful in northwestern Ontario, but the inefficiency of transmitting electricity thousands of kilometres from beyond Lake Superior to southern Ontario makes the idea of buying a large amount of power from there improbable.

The claim: He’ll resign if he doesn’t create a million jobs.

The problem: His million-jobs plan, ridiculed by most economists and defended in a few of its details by a couple, is for eight years. He’d … quit at the end of a second term if it turns out he’s a failure? This doesn’t even make sense.

Andrea Horwath

The claim: A tax credit for job creators, up to $5,000 for each job created, will get the economy moving again.

The problem: Certainly nobody will turn down the money, but it’s very unlikely an employer will decide to make a lasting commitment to a new hire, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a year, because the government will cover $5,000 of the expense once. Ensuring the jobs that lead to the credit last for any length of time would create a massive regulatory burden for the government and demand a lot of paperwork and proof from the employers. Horwath offered this as an alternative to Wynne’s direct subsidies, but it’s pretty much the same thing on a smaller scale.

The claim: The Liberals plan to send a lot more diesel GO Trains into Toronto. For some reason this got Horwath and Wynne very exercised.

The problem: The Liberals have talked about increasing GO service for Toronto commuters, including a major investment in electric trains to eliminate diesel engines. The NDP claim seems to hinge on the fact electrifying the GO system wasn’t specifically mentioned in the Liberal platform as something a $29-billion transportation program would pay for.

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